


shove

by textbookchoices



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:29:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27172468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/textbookchoices/pseuds/textbookchoices
Summary: It was time then, to cut them all off.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	shove

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GotTheSilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GotTheSilver/gifts).



Harlan Thrombey was an old man.

He’d made many mistakes in his life. Oh, he’d made his fortune and a name for himself by writing good, solid mystery novels. He’d fallen in love with a beautiful woman who’d given him three children, who had all in turn given him grandchildren.

He’d made many mistakes, despite how his life might appear to an outsider, and at that very moment, they were all sitting at his dining table, holding a dozen arguments and viciously inflicting every hurt they could manage, stealing every morsel of whatever they could fit in their pockets.

Joni is passively waving a fork in the air at Linda, who has lifted a finger to point it at Richard, who is spouting off something political to the irritation of Jacob _and_ Meg both (though for vastly different offenses), who’ve by some miracle resisted a physical altercation just yet. Donna and Walt are snapping back at Richard, and around and around it goes.

His legacy, his children.

Spoiled, due to his own negligence, his own failures.

He'd made them into what they were.

Ransom sat in the corner, rolling his eyes at the rest of the family, as though he had any ability to judge them for their behavior, for their greed and hateful words. Though Ransom, for all that he could be the worst of them all when he felt the urge to join in and let his opinions be known, was Harlan’s favorite of his grandchildren.

You weren’t supposed to have favorites of course, but Harlan had never been good at following the rules, and Ransom—Ransom was rather like _him_. Intelligent, strategic; a mind built for language and poetry. For riddles and puzzles and solving mysteries.

The boy—and he wasn’t a boy any longer, was he? It’s taken Harlan too long to see it—had never bothered to use any of it. Ransom had never had a job other that one summer when Harlan had rather thought he might push Ransom into the business of writing. He collected his check, just like the rest of them, and Harlan should be grateful he got a game of _Go_ once a week for his trouble.

God knows the boy would be talented enough at writing if he’d ever bother to give a shit about anything but the expensive sweaters he wore and the cars he drove.

Harlan, despite seeing so much of himself in Ransom, had never been spoiled as a child. He’d had to work for everything he had, and he’d let his desire to give them everything they needed—everything he’d never had—spoil them entirely.

Harlan had driven himself to this lot in life, when his only company were the dogs, the nurse he paid to stay for longer than she needed to, and the family that only cared about the money he’d lined their pockets with their entire lives, wanting more and more.

He could remember a time when he’d been struggling to find a bed, pushed out the door by his father the day he’d turned eighteen. He’d written his first novel in a notebook stained by the rain in a train station, and then with a secondhand broken typewriter that had nonetheless cost him a week’s worth of food to buy.

It was time Ransom and the others snapped out of this easy life he’d given them. He wanted them all to make something of themselves—something that was their own. He wanted them to be better than he’d made them.

All of them.

It was time then, to cut them all off.

Maybe it would be Ransom to finally do something with his life. Maybe it would be Meg. Maybe Walt would finally get his head out of his ass, and maybe Linda would finally slip a bit of arsenic in Richard’s evening tea.

Well, for now, his will was in need of revision, and his family—though he loved them all deeply—needed a firm shove out the door.


End file.
